Theorising Organisational Compassion: Could Gossip Help?

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate how contemporary organisation theories, theorising, and practice-based approaches to compassion and gossip can offer insights into the challenges facing the universities of the future. It introduces fresh thinking about gossip as applied social epistemology, which is about the relevance of knowledge generated from ordinary aspects of everyday life, and the generation of action-oriented theory. The chapter is based on the premise that universities are organisations and workplaces with employees that include educators, teachers, researchers, leaders, managers, and those working in roles that support student learning. They all do work that has real consequences for students, staff, and society. It argues that insights from contemporary thinking and theorising about organisational compassion and gossip have real relevance and application in twenty-first-century universities. This represents an alternative to theories and models based on neoliberal ideology, performance philosophy and metrics, and unimaginative academic writing. The chapter argues that these are old and outdated models which have led to organisational systems and processes that are no longer fit for purpose. The changing landscape of higher education requires a radical change in thinking that challenge: (i) traditional approaches to research and knowledge production; and (ii) unnecessary proliferation of theoretical constructs in academic writing. The chapter brings compassion and gossip together using the theoretical lens of communicative constitution of organisations (CCO) and considers what this means for equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). It also includes consideration of the intersections and gaps between gossip, compassion, organisational communication, and knowledge.